Ep. 68 – W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

Join Emily, B, Sid, and John for a classic AAP text discussion, this time featuring W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil. Our discussion begins (perhaps unsurprisingly!) with knowledge, education, and epistemology, and spans Du Bois’s analysis of racial capitalism, his materialism, aesthetics, canonization as a political theorist, and more. We interrogate Du Bois as a democratic theorist in his own right, analyze his (maybe) humanism and (maybe) universalism, and ask, what does it mean to read DuBois as a prescient diagnostician of our own political moment (and who is the revolutionary subject?)? While we barely scratch the surface of all this book has to offer (what of “work,” whiteness, poetics, and proto-feminism in this text?!), we welcome you to join us for the close reading, and stay for the water puns!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

 

Links:

• Gutenberg ebook of Darkwater
• NAACP biography of Du Bois
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Du Bois
• Du Bois Bibliography at the National Archives
• Keisha Blain on Du Bois, Pan-Africanism, and Anti-colonialism
• Farah Griffin on Black Feminists and Du Bois
• Ange-Marie Hancock on Du Bois and Intersectionality
• J. Phillip Thompson on “Capitalism, Democracy, and Du Bois’s Two Proletariats”
• Ella Myers on Du Bois and white sadism

W.E.B. Du Bois in 1918; from WikiMedia Commons

 

First edition of Darkwater; from WikiMedia Commons

Interview: Jessica Blatt on Race and the Making of American Political Science — Epistemic Unruliness 34

In this episode, John welcomes Jessica Blatt, Associate Professor of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College, for a conversation about her 2018 book Race and the Making of American Political Science. What was political science’s role in shaping a de-radicalizing ‘race relations’ paradigm? How did the early discipline of political science turned to categories of ‘race’ in a bid for foundation funding and claims to scientific knowledge? What are the pedagogical implications for political scientists today of the book and of this genealogy of racism in the discipline? Tune in to explore these and other questions about a sometimes (read: frequently) ahistorical and not particularly self-reflective discipline).

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

 

Links:

• Follow Jessica Blatt on Twitter
• A 2019 interview with Blatt at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History
• A 2018 interview with Blatt on Detroit Today
• A 2018 talk by Blatt, “With a Little Help from our Friends: Scientific Racism and the Making of Modern Political Science“
• Books mentioned: Leah Gordon, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America; Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics; Alice O’Connor: Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History

 

 

Teaching the Political Theory Canon – AAP Pedagogy Hour

Join us for this special episode of the AAP – special because all of your hosts are actually in the same place, and special because we devote the whole episode to pedagogy. Rachel, John, and previous guest host Siddhant Issar convene in St. Louis  to discuss what it means to teach the political theory canon in our contemporary political situation. How important are all these dead white European men in shaping the politics of today? What is the best way to engage students in teaching the canon? How can one both teach the canon – as many have to do – while also challenging structures and discourses of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism? Listen in as we try to puzzle through some of these challenges. Stick around for some dream analysis, as we try to interpret a listener’s dream about mahogany rooms and never-ending curtains.

Support us on Patreon to help us upgrade our recording equipment. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion for the intro music, to Jordan Cass for the music in between segments, and always already to B for the outro music. Get the mp3 of the episode here.

N.B. John’s syllabi are available here.

 

found at: http://bit.ly/2vq7gh4

Interview: Banu Bargu on the Weaponization of Life

Over at New Books in Global Ethics and Politics, John interviewed Banu Bargu on her recent book. Thanks to the NBN, we are cross-posting the episode here.

What is the relationship between state power and self-destructive violence as a mode of political resistance? In her book Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2014), Banu Bargu (Politics, The New School) analyzes the Turkish death fast movement and explores self-inflicted death as a political practice. Amid a global intensification of the “weaponization of life,” Bargu argues for conceptualizing this self-destructive use of the body as a complex political and existential act. In doing so, she theorizes a reconfiguration of sovereignty into biosovereignty and of resistance into necroresistance. To accomplish this, the book innovatively weaves together political and critical theory with ethnography in a way that enables the self-understanding and self-narration of those in and around the death fast movement to speak to canonical thinkers and concepts.

 

 

Interview: Neil Roberts on Freedom as Marronage – Epistemic Unruliness 6

Thanks to our friends at the New Books Network, we are cross-posting John’s interview with Neil Roberts for New Books in Global Ethics here. Enjoy!

What does it mean to be free?  How can paying attention to the relationship between freedom and slavery help construct a concept and practice of freedom that is “perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight” (181)? In his book Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Neil Roberts (Africana Studies, Religion, and Political Science, Williams College) explores this and many other questions. Proceeding from and working with the concept and practice of marronage – modes of escape from slavery emerging from the Caribbean – Roberts articulates a theory of freedom that is historically specific while having trans-historical reverberations, and that is attentive to lived experiences of freedom and slavery. In doing so, he engages histories of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, diaspora, the Haitian Revolution, and American slavery. Arguing for the need to creolize political theory and philosophy, Roberts also takes up the thought and practice of W.E.B. DuBois, Hannah Arendt, Philip Petit, Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Edouard Glissant, Rastafari, and much more.